I recall listening to a podcast and they where talking about the Xbox 360 hardware failures. The person used the phrase when your 360 dies instead of if your 360 dies. At the time I must be the exception because mine has worked great since I bought mine after launch. Well 13 months later looks like mine had finally died. Personally I blame Capcon's Lost Planet. This game has given me a lot of problems and has often froze my 360. I thought maybe I had a bad disk so I sold the game back to GameStop and rented a new one from GameFly.

Well I threw the game in last night and I got past the area I couldn't before because the 360 would freeze and I figured it was just a bad disk. Then it happened, in the boss battle at the end of the level the game froze. I shut down and tried again. I was very annoyed Capcon does not save checkpoint data to the hard drive so all progress was lost. I then started up again and got to the point where it used to freeze in the past and that's when it happened. The console froze in blurred graphics and the controller vibrated constantly. Since it was only a few minutes till Lost I turned off the system and watched some TV.

When I returned I was greeted with the one thing ever 360 owner fears...a flashing red light. Well I also got a nice error message with an error code telling me what's wrong. I powered down, removed the hard drive, unplugged all other cables and tried again. Same error message popped on the screen so I decided to check out the internet. I found an article that said the issue was with the video cable. I'm using a VGA cable but still have my component cable the system came with so I tracked that down and plugged it in. Same error message. So I powered down and called Microsoft support. I got a nice lady that walked me through a few things and we resolved the issue. The error was gone and I was content.

I ended the call and decided to play a little BulletWitch. Well everything seemed ok until I started playing. The graphics where all screwed up. It looked like I was playing in a snow storm. I managed to finish the level and get my achievement for betting the game on Hard. The odd thing is the dashboard looked perfectly fine. I did notice that the sound for moving around on options sounded funny. Sounded more like pong than the normal noise it made. I called it a night and was thankful the system was running.

I woke up this morning and no one else was up yet so I decided to get some early gaming. I turned the system on and what do I see? The flashing red light and the same error message. I didn't have time to mess with it this morning so I headed back upstairs and got ready for work. I'll replace the video cable tonight and see if that helps. Maybe take some photos and put them online. I'm not totally disappointed the 360 failed. My 360 was manufactured 11-30-2005 and it's well known those early consoles where rushed out the door and many of them failed with this exact error message. I really just wish it would have lasted a little longer since the HDMI 360s are coming out soon.

I called the Xbox support line and after about five minutes I was told my 360 had a hardware failure and I would have to ship mine in to their Texas repair center. I'm on the hook for the repair cost and shipping the unit. I paid to have my original xbox fixed and I'm beyond the warranty period so I wasn't surprised. It will take 10 to 14 business days to fix my console. I went to a UPS store tonight and shipped it out. They said it will arrive in Texas on Wednesday so I will be without my 360 for almost a month. I'm tempted to buy a Core backup but with all this talk of a new 360 coming I really want to wait and see what happens.